Kazakh mathematician may have solved $1 million puzzle

MATHEMATICS is a universal language. Even so, a Kazakh mathematician’s claim to have solved a problem worth a million dollars is proving hard to evaluate – in part because it is written in Russian.

The Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem concerns equations that are used to model fluids – from airflow over a plane’s wing to the crashing of a tsunami. The equations work, but there is no proof that solutions exist for all possible situations.

The problem concerns equations used to model fluids, from the flow of air over a wing to a tsunami

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, now in Providence, Rhode Island, named this one of seven Millennium Prize problems, offering &dollar;1 million to anyone who could devise a proof.

The community is cautious. “There have been several alleged solutions to the Navier Stokes problem that turned out to be wrong,” says Charles Fefferman of Princeton University, who wrote Clay’s official formulation of the problem. “Since I don’t speak Russian and the paper is not yet translated, I’m afraid I can’t say more.”

Otelbayev has published many successful papers, so mathematicians are paying more attention to his proof than is typical for efforts to solve Millennium Prize problems, which are regularly posted online. Otelbayev also says that three colleagues in Kazakhstan and another in Russia agree that the proof is correct. Efforts to translate the paper are under way.